Welcome to what is the 1236th original profile here at “Fanatical Republican Extremist of the Day”, where we’ll be profiling Kelly Cooper, a 2022 candidate for U.S. House of Representatives in Arizona’s 4th Congressional District who was hoping his resume as a restauranteur that owned Arizona’s locations of The Melting Pot franchise would be a enough to unseat former Phoenix mayor and the incumbent Democratic Congressman in a blue-leaning seat, Greg Stanton. After redistricting, it was thought AZ-4 would be more competitive with the Republican-controlled Arizona state legislature trying to gerrymander the map to their advantage, and Cooper would potentially reap the benefits of that after he won the five candidate GOP Primary with only 28% of the vote, hardly running away with things.
In the general election, Greg Stanton still was polling with a healthy lead… and that’s when Kelly Cooper’s financial disclosure forms got strange, and he suddenly amended them to try and explain how over a million dollars in cash appeared in his bank accounts to loan to his own campaign. We’ll call that “interesting”, and by that we mean “suspicious” because there’s no indication of where that $1.3 million came from.
What truly doomed Kelly Cooper was his own mouth. Cooper had the terrible opinion to release all the indicted domestic terrorists from the attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6th, 2021, from jail, and who cited his inspiration to run as having been the government asking his businesses to follow guidelines and mandates to help stop the spread of Covid-19 during the pandemic. After the FBI raided Mar-a-Lago to recover classified documents stolen, and not returned by Mar-a-Lardo, Cooper came out hard in defense of Trump, comparing the federal agents trying to protect American national security to the Nazis and Hitler’s Gestapo.
Which, for a guy who wanted Trump’s vanity project and useless boondoggle of a physical wall along the U.S./Mexico border completed, is laughable.
After Greg Stanton managed to frame himself quite clearly as less of an extremist than his opponent, Kelly Cooper lost the race in 2022, getting just 44% of the vote, even with the gerrymandering that should have made him a lot more competitive in the race. He has already jumped back into a mad quest to unseat Stanton in 2024, but he still has to slip out of the primary again in a far less crowded field. We hope he never gets closer to DC than he already has.
One Year Ago, September 7th, 2022: Kevin Leach (AZ)
Two Years Ago, September 7th, 2021: Josh Barnett (AZ)
Three Years Ago, September 7th, 2020: Joe Arpaio (AZ)… 2020 Update
Four Years Ago, September 7th, 2019:Joe Arpaio (AZ)… 2019 Update
Five Years Ago, September 7th, 2018: Joe Arpaio (AZ)… 2018 Update
Six Years Ago, September 7th, 2017: Joe Arpaio (AZ)… 2017 Update
Seven Years Ago, September 7th, 2016:Joe Arpaio (AZ)… 2016 Update
Eight Years Ago, September 7th, 2015: Joe Arpaio (AZ)… 2015 Update
Nine Years Ago, September 7th, 2014:Joe Arpaio (AZ)… Original Profile